Which city is better Athens or Thessaloniki?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-03 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Modern Greek

What are the main differences, i heard Thessaloniki is more cosmopolitan

Oddly enough, my wife (who is not in any way Greek) spontaneously said Salonica was cosmopolitan when she visited it. So there’s something to that.

The hostility between Athens and Salonica within the Modern Greek state is of very long standing: Salonica was incorporated into Modern Greece in 1913, and three years later it was the capital of a government rivalling Athens during the National Schism.

As with all such rivalries between the First and the Second city or country, it consumes the Second, and is blithely ignored by the First. My relatives in Salonica would mutter darkly to me about how Athens diverted all resources away from the North, and how the Salonica Metro would never finish, and how proud they are that “AMAN The Scumbags” were the only national TV show filmed in Salonica, dammit (and their subsequent incarnation Radio Arvyla still is).

Athens’ reaction to all that, of course, would be… “Oh, they have a TV studio up there? How adorable.”

Michalis Rizos’ answer (one of the very few pro-Athens) points out a truth: Salonica was cosmopolitan before WWI, and for a long time it was the more liberal and progressive of the two cities, but it became insular and downright claustrophobic for a while in the 90s. It is one of the oddities of Greek TV that I watched a quite intelligent and insightful discussion of Salonica’s turning inwards on Themos Anastasiadis’ chat show—in between the strippers and the facile mocking of politicians.

Thessalonica is a much loved and much-sung city. All together now, my fellow Greeks: you all know how these songs go.

My Thessalonica. stixoi.info: Θεσσαλονίκη μου. Lyrics: Christos Kolokotronis. Music: Manolis Hiotis. 1955. Singers: Stelios Kazantzidis & Manolis Hiotis.

My Thessalonica, great mother of the poor!
You who give forth the finest people.
My Thessalonica, great mother of the poor!
Wherever I go I have you in my heart!

I’ll never deny you, my Thessalonica!
You’re my home, I say it and I feel proud!

Beautiful Thessalonica. stixoi.info: Όμορφη Θεσσαλονίκη. Lyrics & Music: Vasilis Tsitsanis. 1950. Singer: Glykeria.

You’re the pride of my heart,
sweet, beautiful Thessalonica.
And even if I live in Athens the temptress,
I sing of you every evening.

Oh! Beautiful Thessalonica!
Oh! How I miss your magical evenings!

Salonicans don’t love it when Athenians love her patronisingly (“the most romantic city of the Balkans”), but Salonica is lovely and loveable. There was a brief time around 2008 when I fell out of love with her (stumbling over Salonica Metro roadworks), but the restoration of the beachside promenade has made her the true Queen of Cities once again. My Salonican coauthor and I ended up dedicating our monograph to her.

Athens? Poor Athens. If you veer off the tourist haunts in Plaka and wander the backstreets, you’ll see that Athens used to be lovely once too, in the 1890s. But Athens is now a machine for living in, much like a Le Corbusier edifice. It has nice bits. And it has the fearsome heritage of the Classics. But it doesn’t gel into something lovable, like Salonica does. It’s too busy encompassing half the population of a country.

It’s true that there are plenty of songs about Athens too; stixoi.info: Αναζήτηση στίχων ( αθήνα ). I just didn’t know any of them. Many of them struck the same tone as those two Salonica hits I posted. Yet this song—another I’d never heard of, even if it was sung by the inevitable George Dalaras—gives you a taste of what a mixed blessing the town is. A very brackish taste. Ignore the panegyric highlight images of the vid, and pay attention to the lyrics.

Athens. stixoi.info: Αθήνα. Lyrics: Sotia Gatsou. Music: Christos Gartzos. 1978. Singer: George Dalaras.

I know a town where the ashphalt burns
and you’ll find no tree shade.
Great history, important ancestors,
the lantern of the world, and its tomb.

Athens, you remind me of a woman sobbing
because nobody desires her.
Athens, Athens, I die with you
and you die with me.

I know a town in the new Sahara,
a desert full of concrete.
Foreign fleets, smuggled cigarettes,
and children who don’t know how to play hide and seek.

I know a town in the land of the Abyss,
an island of pirates and winds.
In the streets of Plaka you sell your body
for one glass of wine.

Is it possible to speak Klingon without sounding aggressive?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-03 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Artificial Languages

As Jarno Peschier’s answer says, the brief for Marc Okrand was to create an aggressive-sounding language, that would map onto the “Blakh Vakh Gakh” aggressive sounds James Doonan had made up for the first Star Trek movie. And Okrand accordingly went shopping for gutturals: /x, q, qχ, ʔ/ <H, q, Q, ’>. I guess you can add /tɬ/ <tlh> as an honorary guttural, because of its affrication.

Does a language full of gutturals have to sound aggressive at all times? I’m sure Tolkien would say yes—which is part of the reason I haven’t gotten into Elvish. (Cellar door. Pfft. That’s just effete.)

Well, look at languages that have one or more of those gutturals. Is it possible to speak Arabic without sounding aggressive? Chechen? Nahuatl? German?

The human spirit, much like intonation and pitch, is suprasegmental. A couple of gutturals aren’t going to make a mother’s lullaby sound any less soothing to a baby.

I wrote a Crown of sonnets 22 years ago. It was a love poem sequence. The frontispiece was in Klingon. Here’s my reading of it. You tell me.

Rachel’s Crown

Why do Europeans say, “Where there are Italians, there is dirt”?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-02 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Other Languages

Because there was a perception 50 years ago that Italians were dirtier than Northern Europeans. They may not be saying that now, but there is still stereotyping between parts of Europe, and the claims that this saying is impossible ring hollow to me.

I don’t have a smoking gun of someone saying it; but I do have a smoking gun of someone expressing the sentiment. That someone was Greek, and in fact, he was expressing annoyance at how clean Austria was compared to Italy.

Nikos Tsiforos. Gulliver in the land of the Giants (humorous travelogue through Central Europe). 1967. p. 12.

Why does everything have to be so clean? A Southerner will never understand this. Over in Tarvisio, ten Italian paces from here [Arnoldstein], there’s waste paper, filth, dust, leftovers from horse and cow hindquarters. Tourism pleads: “keep the area clean!”, but noone pays any attention—except for the pine trees, who are law-abiding citizens when they’re up on the mountaintops. Here in Arnoldstein, it’s as if they’ve made 300,000 Austrians lick the road clean. There’s not one piece of rubbish. Austria should be ashamed of how clean it is.

He says pretty much the same crossing the Swiss border into Italy at Valpelline.

What is the most British thing ever?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-01 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Other Languages

This is obscure. But Quora is a stamping ground for me to pass on anecdotes.

This anecdote involves one of the doyens of Mediaeval and Modern Greek Studies in Fair Albion, Professor Geoff Horrocks.

Author of the most authoritative English-language summary of the history of Greek there is:

That’s the second edition cover. The first edition cover is to my mind more accurate, and I loved the look on classicists’ faces when they saw it:

Anyway, the anecdote takes place a couple of years before he published the first edition. The Second International Conference on Greek Linguistics was being held in Salzburg, in 1995. The conference had a couple of Russians, a few Anglos, two Dutch-speakers (one of them Flemish), and a gajillion voluble Greeks. And your humble correspondent was present, too; in fact, I got a paper published in the proceedings.

Towards the end of the conference, Khorox (as the Greeks present all pronounced him) thought it might be a good idea to moot the formation of a professional association of Greek Linguistics.

Oh, Khorox, that was not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. The lecture theatre instantly got consumed by polemics of Athens Uni vs Salonica Uni. (There is a longstanding ideological dispute between the two departments—but of course there is an even longer standing dispute between the two cities.) Me and Helma the Dutch speaker just sat at the back of the lecture theatre, chuckling at the rich cavalcade of histrionics.

After maybe a half hour of this, Khorox stands up and says, “can we please try and arrive at some consensus before Doomsday!”

The Grecian ears ignored him, and kept on duking out Athens vs Salonica: The Grudgefest. My antipodean ears were more finely attuned, and so were Helma’s: we just looked at each other and blinked. That was pretty much the British equivalent of Khorox grabbing a baseball bat and going postal.

In a roomful of Athens vs Salonica: The Grudgefest, though, it was hardly noticed…

What are the most “moving” and “emotional” Greek songs of all time?

By: | Post date: 2017-08-01 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

… No, I don’t think I’ve posted enough about Greek songs, actually.

Other than Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the most recent song you’ve cried to?, here’s three more torch songs. Yes, all sung by George Dalaras, and I make no apologies for that.

1. My favourite song ever is Don’t Be Angry At Me, My Dear Eyes. Music & Lyrics: Stavros Kouyioumtzis, 1965. stixoi.info: Μη μου θυμώνεις μάτια μου

The saddest song of a composer who wrote consistently sad songs. It’s the lyrics, but much more it’s the music, which belies the lyrics.

Don’t be angry at me, my dear eyes,
for going abroad
I’ll turn into a bird and I’ll come
back to you once more

Open your window,
my blond basil,
and with a sweet smile
bid me goodnight

Don’t be angry at me, my dear eyes,
now that I’ll leave you
Come out for a while so I can see you
and farewell you

Apart from the idiosyncrasies of Greek terms of endearment (Eyes, Basil), pretty much what every man ever had said farewelling his sweetheart. But the music is pessimistic: it’s all descending lines, it knows that he’s never coming back—sometimes in a low resigned register, sometimes in a high anguished register. What cements it is, it has brief moments of major key respite: two beats in the verse, a more convincing 2–5–1 cadence in the chorus—that immediately gets quashed by the minor key V: there is hope, and that hope is brushed aside.

2. The letter. Lyrics: Giorgos Mitsakis. Music: Giorgos Zambetas, 1956.

If Markos Vamvakaris was the Bach of the bouzouki tradition, and Vassilis Tsitsanis the Beethoven, then Giorgos Zampetas was the Offenbach: his music was fun, frothy, and not usually that memorable. This song is an exception, and I’m not surprised that it only became popular in a revival 20 years after it was released. It has that solemn, stern dignity of the best of laiko, even if it’s just that bit too European.

And ah, that last stanza: who hasn’t been there.

When you receive this letter,
I’ll be long gone
And you’ll believe it that two loves
cannot fit in one heart.

When you receive this letter
then will you cry with black tears.

You always spoke behind a mask
and wished to have two embraces
But where did you get the right
to toy with two hearts?

And so ends a story
with this sad letter.
I don’t regret that I once loved you.
But I am sorry that I still do.

3. I want it to be a Sunday. Music & Lyrics: Vasilis Tsitsanis, 1961.

This is not Rebetiko, of course; Tsitsanis the Beethoven was very far from the stern jauntiness of Vamvakaris, even if he got his professional start soloing on Vamvakaris’ album. (And his virtuoso playing sounds utterly out of place in 1938.)

In this song, he’s unabashedly wearing his heart on his sleeve, and wailing in a way that hadn’t been heard since the Anatolian antecedents of Rebetiko: the whole song is a study in the hanging leading tone, which never resolves up, but always collapses down.

There is extramusical context to the song, which I didn’t know beforehand: it was written four years after the death of Marika Ninou—a singer who Tsitsanis had worked with extensively, and who the movie Rembetiko (film) was based on.

I met you on a Sunday
I lose you on a Sunday
I want it to be a Sunday
on the day I die

You set like a star
and vanished, my joy.
My sorrow was so heavy
that it blackened Sunday
and broke my heart.

The hour of parting
is heavy and unbearable
In my dark life
I have the black heavens
as my companion now.

I would die on a Sunday
to give Death joy
to end a life
that is nothing but a prison for me
that is nothing but dead weight for me

EDIT: One more Dalaras song. (Yes, Evangelos Lolos, you’re on to me.)

4. Hammer and anvil. Music: Apostolos Kaldaras. Lyrics: Lefteris Papadopoulos. 1973.

The reference to gypsies at the start of the song simply reflects the distribution of labour in traditional Greek society: gypsies on the mainland got to be blacksmiths—or musicians.

I actually don’t know what Western ears will make of the verse’s scale, with its blue IV note squirming around its own misery, or the relative major ending up a relative minor. (D minor with a G♭ note, modulating to B♭ minor.) I do think they’ll get the chorus, at least, with its IV–V–I soaring on a despairing F major, before it sinks back to the blue notes of the verse.

The song is a study in depression—although I’ve been avoiding it the more serious my depression has gotten.

Come, gypsy, gather
hammer and anvil,
and sit and make a prison
to fit the black pains
which won’t fit within a soul.

This is no nighttime which will be over.
This is no daytime which will be past.
This is my lifetime, in this creation,
and it’s just like Good Friday mass.

Come, gypsy, gather
hammer and anvil,
and sit and make a golden cage
to capture that nightingale
which might just console my Sunday.

Ooh! He Said ‘Fuck’! He must be a revolutionary!

By: | Post date: 2017-07-31 | Comments: 1 Comment
Posted in categories: Literature, Mediaeval Greek

I’ve been pondering taboos for quite a while now; you’ll see a recent rumination from me at Nice skewering of Humour as Virtue Signalling.

In the West latterly, we exult in people breaking taboos, as if being a rebel and a taboo-breaker is its own reward. You know,

Well, people tell me love is for fools.
Here I go, I’m breaking all the rules.
It seems so easy. (Seems so easy, seems so easy, seems so easy.)
It’s so doggone easy

Well, you’re breaking the rules against sounding like a goddamn hick, anyway.

What’s that? A horrible prejudiced thing to say? Yes, of course it is. That’s a taboo. Not “falling in lurve”. Not premarital petting. Not whatever bizarre fantasy version of 50s America is being portrayed in Footloose. We congratulate ourselves for breaking taboos—and the minute everyone’s breaking a taboo, it no longer is much of a taboo now, is it.

Saying “fuck”. Not a taboo.

Talking about sex. Not a taboo.

Used to be a taboo, sure. But that doesn’t say much.

As Nick Nicholas’ answer to Is Greek pop culture less interested in the Middle Ages than Western pop culture? describes, I’ve just picked up a copy of the new edition of Stephanos Sachlikis’ poetry. (Greek-speakers, see the review in Η μισογυνική και άσεμνη ποίηση του Κρητικού Στέφανου Σαχλίκη (14ος αι.)) Sachlikis wrote in the 1370s, and he was the first Christian Greek poet to use rhyme.

I say “first Christian Greek poet”, because the first poet to use rhyme in Greek at all was Rumi. Yes, that Rumi. Nick Nicholas’ answer to How are Rumi’s poems in Greek?

Sachlikis’ poems are about his dissolute youth; the Black Death had been and gone when he was a teenager, death was everywhere, so he partied hard, and spent his money on gambling and prostitutes. He ended up in jail, where he wrote his poems, and after he got out of jail, he retired to his feudal property in the countryside.

He said “fuck” a lot, and he talked about sex. Which means he’s filthy. In fact, his editors call him the filthiest writer in Greek up until the surrealist free-for-all sex romp of Andreas EmbirikosMegas Anatolikos. I’m not convinced he should beat out the scatology of the Mass of the Beardless Man (Spanos), but I guess that depends on whether you think scatology or pornography is filthier.

Just because he’s filthy, doesn’t mean he’s a revolutionary. The editor points out that scholars from the GDR and USSR paid him attention, hoping to find hints that he was some rebel trying to undermine The System. But he was no such thing: once he got to his farm, he was just as scathing about the peasantry he was exploiting. And when he was in jail, he was a complete snob about his jailers’ drunkenness.

Just because he’s filthy doesn’t mean he’s our kindred spirit either. The posthumous lecture from the editor talks about how obscure Sachlikes is, and he speculates that Greeks might latch on to him because he’s filthy, because his profanity sounds so fresh and modern, because Modern Greeks, too, swear a lot. And I have seen several essays singling out his Parliament of Whores for how delightfully modern it sounds:

Γαμιέται η Κουταγιώταινα κι ο σκύλος της γαυγίζει
και κλαίσι τα παιδάκια της κι εκείνη χαχανίζει.
Η χήρα η Καψαμπέλαινα έναι όπου την μαυλίζει
και τρώ’ την ώς το κόκαλον, διά να την συργουλίζει.
Στου Κουταγιώτη την αυλή κέρατα ξεφυτρώνουν,
κόπελος έν’ στο σπίτιν του, δι’ αυτούνον εξεστρώνουν,
και λέγουν της: «Πολιτική, διατί δεν σε γκαστρώνουν;»

They’re fucking Koutayotis’ wife. Dogs bark,
her kids cry, and she thinks it such a lark.
Old Kapsambelis’ widow is her pimp;
she flatters cash from her till she goes limp.
In Koutayotis’ yard the cuck horns grow.
A bastard’s in his house and in the know.
They tell her: “Whore, why won’t your belly show?”

But the editor Panayotakis did drop a hint that, again, we’re being misled. A very cryptic hint: His swearing may sound like it echoes contemporary Greek realities (καθημερινότητα), but Greek readers will be disappointed to find that he is not of our time.

Is he a too-cool-for-school, komboloi-twirling petty thief of the 1920s? A barhopping fuckboy of the 90s? Is he someone contemporary Greeks would recognise, as someone they’d talk to in the street? Or least, someone they’d have heard songs about?

No, of course not. He’s a feudal lord from the 14th century. He’s a relentless misogynist; and while Greeks are quite familiar with misogyny, they’re not familiar any more with the moralising pre-Ottoman version. He relishes in talking of what sex workers get up to, but it’s a lot of venom and not a lot of fun; and it retreats back, in the end, to the cosily mediaeval notion of counsels to one’s son: Francis (Frandzeskis) is to avoid wandering at night, dice, and whores.

I’m looking forward to rereading Sachlikis’ poems in the new edition; and I will enjoy the language. But its salutary to be reminded that, just because he’s writing in my language, doesn’t make him my countryman: the past is always a foreign country.

With different taboos, that we are at pains to make any sense of.

Alkis Alkaios: Erotiko

By: | Post date: 2017-07-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Modern Greek, Music

I think I may end up setting up a separate blog, just for Greek song lyrics. The mysticism and allusiveness of Greek songs never ceases to enchant me.

Evangelos Lolos’ answer to What are the most “moving” and “emotional” Greek songs of all time? A rich harvest, with several songs I did not know, even if he did end it with a shout out to me.

Now, this—

—this sounds like a typical light zeimbekiko, right? And if it’s called “love song”, then it must be about, I dunno, I’m hanging out to meet you babe, why can’t you divorce your husband, or something.

Think again. And marvel at the profusion of interpretations offered at stixoi.info: Ερωτικό ( Με μια πιρόγα ) (the Greek lyrics site), including a quite plausible theory that it actually refers to the history of the postwar left in Greece. (The lyricist Alkis Alkaios was a member of the Greek Communist Party).

Lyrics: Alkis Alkaios. Music: Thanos Mikroutsikos. I’m tweaking the translation at stixoi.info: Love Song (Erotiko).

Thank you Evangelos Lolos.

You leave and come back in a canoe
In the hours when the rain grows fiercer
You sail in the land of the Visigoths
And the Hanging Gardens claim you
Yet slowly you saw your own wings off

Your naked body has been covered with salt
I brought you fresh water from Delphi
You said your life would be cut in two
And before I had the chance to deny you thrice
The key to paradise had rusted away

The caravan runs among the dust
And chases after your crazy shadow
How can a mind be calmed down with a shroud
How can the Mediterranean be bound with ropes,
Oh Love, which we used to call Antigone

What night song has taken away your light
And in which galaxy will I find you
This is Attica, a pallid quarry
And I am a cheap firing range
Where foreign soldiers practice, swearing

What is the origin of Greek expression “I threw a black stone behind me” (Eριξα μαύρη πέτρα πίσω μου)?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Modern Greek

You know how Quora questions are really just an excuse for us to write interesting stuff?

This is how this answer came about.

I was reminded of this question, and Konstantinos Konstantinides’ answer, when I used the phrase with him today. I went googling, because the account given in his link didn’t sound convincing: it didn’t have any specifics to it.

I’ve found enough in the following link to corroborate it, and it’s such an astounding story, that I’m using this question as an excuse to share it.

So, Konstantinos’ answer says that Greeks would curse a bad event by throwing black stones at the site where the deed happened, with their backs turned. They would ritually curse by saying “anathema” as they cast the stone, and the pile of stones itself would be called an “anathema”, or an “anathematistra” (an anathematiser).

Hence, if you’re cursing a place, and vowing never to set foot in it again, you might as well be throwing a black stone at it, behind you (as you turn your back on it and leave it).

So: Ανάθεμα και κατάρα στον… σατανά Βενιζέλο

It’s December 12, 1916. Greece is split between its pro-German King, and its pro-Entente Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos, who is about to enter Greece into WWI on the side of the Entente. Venizelos has just declared a coup against the King, and has set up his own government in Salonica. There has been armed conflict between French and Greek troops in Athens in the previous week. Greeks refer to this time as the National Schism. The supporters of the King in Athens are livid.

Livid enough to head down to the the open space which is now the Pedion tou Areos, Athens’ “Field of Mars”, featuring a sculpture of Athena.

The Field of Mars was then called the Polygon, a commons where Athenians could relax: it was not yet officially a park, and it did not yet feature a sculpture of Athena. Where the sculpture of Athena is now, the supporters of the King had dug a big hole. In that hole, they’d placed a boulder. On that boulder, they’d placed a bleeding bull’s head. On that bull’s head, they’d placed a marble inscription: “Anathema to the traitor and his co-conspirators.”

Crowds of royalists gathered at the Polygon with black banners, “each bearing the stone of anathema, holding it in their hands, arms, or shoulders. Wherever there was a stone to be found, regardless of size, they grabbed it. An unending row of carts with hills of stones is being dragged towards the Polygon.” And some of those carts were dragged along by enterpreneurs: “Five cents a white stone, ten cents a black stone!” (Which corroborates that black stones were valued in making the curse stick.)

Someone eventually brings an effigy of Venizelos along, whereupon people start giving the insulting Mountza gesture, and throwing stones: “Anathema and a curse upon the traitor!” “May the earth reject his miserable corpse!”

A modern iteration of the People showing the People’s House the People’s Mountza.

A contemporary cartoonist wishing Venizelos himself was on the anathema pile.

The Archbishop of Athens saw fit to turn up, and cast either a single stone, or four stones to the four points of the horizon, chanting “Against Eleftherios Venizelos, who has arrested archpriests and plotted against Crown and Country, let there be anathema.”

By the next day, Venizelos’ anathema pile looked like this:

When Venizelos came back to Athens in June 1917, the anathema pile was still there, with furtive flower offerings left at night. Venizelos wanted the pile left there. “I do not want the proof of the anathema to be lost! I’ll put guards there! The stones should stay as they are, so that passers-by can see them and understand how vain and foolish Church curses are!”

“But,” the ex-mayor of Athens retorted, “this is ugliness right in the middle of the Field of Mars.”

“We’ll just have to put up with that ugliness, Mr. Benakis. We’ll put up with it for the instruction of the people: they should learn both what the Church’s curse and the Church’s blessing is worth, when the Church is conscripted by political animosity.”

The site of the anathema pile. Now featuring the goddess of instruction, instead of instruction.

Is Greek pop culture less interested in the Middle Ages than Western pop culture?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Culture, Mediaeval Greek, Modern Greek

I’m OP. I’ve asked this, because I’ve seen an erudite claim that this is the case, from the 80s, and am wondering whether it was true then, and is true now.

The claim comes from the recent edition of Stephanos Sachlikis’ poetry. (You know someone’s obscure when their Latin Wikipedia entry is 5 times longer than their English one.) The edition is based on Nikolaos M. Panagiotakis’ work; Panagiotakis died 20 years ago. Its preface includes a lecture Panagiotakis gave 30 years ago, in 1986.

In that lecture, Panagiotakis says that the number of Greeks who would be interested in Sachlikis, however foul-mouthed he was, was minimal, because Greek pop culture was indifferent to the Middle Ages. He contrasted that with the popularity of the Middle Ages in English and German pop culture, and “in the past forty years” (so since WWII) in France and Italy as well. As evidence, he mentioned that his fellow Greeks read Umberto Eco’s Name Of The Rose looking for political judgements, because they were unable culturally to read it for what it was: “a clumsy detective novel written by a brilliant mediaevalist.”

He also predicted that as fads come and go, the Western Middle Ages—and even the Greek Middle Ages (which is not just Byzantine but also French and Italian rule) could eventually become fashionable in Greece.

Now, there has been a little historical fiction set in the Middle Ages in Greek; I’m thinking in particular of Princess Isabeau, published in 1937 and set in the Peloponnese of 1293, about Isabella of Villehardouin. And of course in high culture, Kostis Palamas worked Basil II into his poetic mythology, and Cavafy cherry-picked episodes from the Byzantine as well as the Hellenistic era. And when I was a kid, Porphyry and Blood was a historical soap about Romanos IV Diogenes, which made Michael Psellos a villain.

(As has happened with so many old TV shows, the tapes have been wiped, and the show has not been preserved. I caught the last ever screening, in 1981.)

EDIT: Add “In hoc signo vinces”, about Constantine the Great, from 1973, from the same soapie-peddler, Nikos Foskolos: Εν τούτω νίκα.

But I suspect Panagiotakis was onto something: there doesn’t seem to have been in Greece or Cyprus the profusion of mediaeval-related novels, let alone hit TV series or dinner theatre restaurants, that there have been in Western Europe.

I don’t even know whether the Society for Creative Anachronism flourishes in Greece. I know it flourishes in Australia, and I saw a TV show once where a bearded gentleman, in leather armour and a quite familiar accent, stared at the camera and said “Yeah, so we were playing the Byzantines, and they were playing the Crusaders, and, aaah, basically we kicked their arses, mate!”

That’s a historically ossified account. Very eager to know whether Game Of Thrones has landed on fertile ground in Greece, or whether its mediaevalism was novel to audiences.

Why doesn’t Judeo-Spanish use the letter Ñ?

By: | Post date: 2017-07-30 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Other Languages, Writing Systems

Clyde Thogmartin is right in his answer that traditionally Judeo-Spanish is written in Hebrew (with the quite icky trigraph <ניי> for [ɲ]). But more to the point, even when it is written in Latin script, people writing it usually make a point of not using Spanish orthography: they are putting distance between their language and Christian Spanish. Thus, per Judaeo-Spanish, writers in Turkey usually spell it like Turkish, while the Israeli Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino spells it phonetically, using <ny> instead of <ñ>. (I would assume Turkish spelling would end up doing the same.)

Something similar occurred with 20th Latin transliteration of Yiddish: it has made a point of not resembling German orthography. (19th century Yiddish text even in Hebrew script, OTOH, was daytshmerish “Germanising”, particularly in retaining double consonants, and bits of that remain in use to this day.)

Exceptionally, Judeo-Spanish texts published in Spain do use Spanish orthography, but that is because they are primarily intended for modern Spanish speakers. There has been a proposal to use 1492 spelling of Spanish for Judeo-Spanish, which would retain <ñ>; but that appears to be marginal.

EDIT: SEE ALSO: Erik Painter’s answer to Why doesn’t Judeo-Spanish use the letter Ñ?

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